Archive 14.6.2005 - 25.6.2005

Safari and the Rabenhorst

Does anyone know why Safari on Tiger is saying goodbye to Rabenhorst? And if someone knows, can they tell Kai so he can fix it and I don't have to rewrite an article every time because I wanted to check something with him again?

The strange thing: when I turn off JavaScript with PithHelmet on his site, nothing happens. But his site has no JavaScript - only the Jabber status (which, by the way, is displayed extremely large without JavaScript activation) is embedded via an OBJECT tag instead of an img tag. Could it be the OBJECT tag for PNGs that sends Safari to the Orkus?

Ah, yes, after a bit of digging, it seems to be the case. Go to this page and you will have the same problem - Safari crashes. Apparently, the OBJECT tag is used to display PNGs on older IEs as well - the same PNG is referenced via an OBJECT tag and an included IMG tag. Unfortunately, this leads to crashes with Safari 2.0.

Why disabling JavaScript (not disabling plugins, which one would rather suspect with the OBJECT tag!) leads to Safari not crashing and the PNG being displayed incorrectly (too large), I honestly don't quite understand ...

Oh, and the bug with object tags seems to have existed for a long time - the oldest reports I found in Google are from 2003. It would be nice if Apple would actually fix the bug. Or someone else, since the source is now available.

By the way, OmniWeb - although it also relies on the WebCore framework - does not have this problem. It would have been too easy ...

Update: the culprit has been found. It was the WebDevAdditions for Safari - I simply installed the current b11 and everything works normally again.

Merkel muzzle

Merkel imposes gag order on Union regarding VAT increase:

CDU leader Angela Merkel has reportedly imposed a gag order on her party and faction regarding the topic of VAT increases.

Of course not because the Union does not want to implement a VAT increase - but because voters should not be given the idea that they are firmly planning a VAT increase and then possibly vote for other parties.

The frightening thing about so much stupidity in the strategy? It will probably work with the German voter ...

Environmentalists criticize the Whaling Commission

Those who believed that the meeting of the Whaling Commission was a success for animal rights activists will be proven wrong:

Japan announced that it will double the quota for scientific whaling to more than a thousand whales. In the future, not only minke whales but also endangered fin and humpback whales will be hunted. Homes describes this as a "catastrophe for species conservation."

Under the guise of alleged science, the madness will continue - regardless of whether there will eventually be no more humpback or fin whales left. The threats to small whales will also not decrease in the future - because changes in fishing will not be discussed. Regardless of whether thousands of small whales die in the process.

And of course, all of this is again only for commercial purposes. Even Norway - which certainly has its own whaling history - kills whales mainly to sell them to Japan, where there is more money to be made ...

WebObjects 5.3 and Linux?

Apple releases WebObjects 5.3 Update:

Deploys to virtually any J2EE server or the WebObjects J2SE application server

Who hosted the first WebObjects application under Linux on an OpenSource J2EE server?

CardSystems Exposes 40 Million Identities

Bruce Schneier with some thoughts and possible demands regarding the recent security debacle at a large American credit card authorizer. Apparently, the data should not have been on their system at all - due to the high demands that credit card companies (at least in the documents) place on authorizers, Card Systems should actually be out with Mastercard and Visacard.

Women are still underrepresented in the US IT industry - blogged for Jutta.

Microsoft's Omnipotence Fantasies

Microsoft will enforce Sender ID:

Now Microsoft apparently wants to enforce the system on its own, because soon all emails to Hotmail users that do not come with Sender ID will be visibly marked for Hotmail users and thus labeled as potential spam.

Great. Very big strategy. The working group was dissolved because no agreement could be reached because the patent situation with Sender ID was not resolved by Microsoft - and now Microsoft simply wants to enforce it again.

But I think that in this case Microsoft is cutting into its own flesh: there have long been significantly better webmail services that also play significantly better in the network community. Hotmail has long since lost the importance it once had before being sold to Microsoft. Therefore, my prognosis is that not many people will be particularly impressed by this step. The victims are the Hotmail users and possibly their correspondents, who are stuck with an even inferior mail service anyway ...

OXlook - Open-XChange connects to Outlook - blogged for the company. Don't ask ...

Search engines are not liable for stored thumbnails

No damages for image display in search engine thumbnails - which even received a sensible reasoning from the court, as the thumbnails are only temporarily stored for processing search queries. Although the reasoning is so logical that one almost expects the whole thing to be overturned on appeal and the Hamburg variant (search engines may only use images with consent - which would de facto make image search engines impossible, at least on the scale that would be useful) to prevail ...

I generally consider USB sticks to be unnecessary and silly. But the SwissBit Victorinox retroALOX 1GB has a high "must-have" factor.

The diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1923

I am neither the first nor the most original person to write about Franz Kafka blogged. But no matter how late I jump on the bandwagon, this is a blog that you really should read. And even a Megawattworm couldn't find anything to criticize about its intelligence.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Smalltalk Compiler is an older but still good description of the compiler classes in Smalltalk-80 derivatives like VisualWorks Smalltalk and Squeak.

About Moleskines ...

... writes Astrid Paprotta - lovely.

I admit that I also use Moleskines - the Red-Black ones are also quite nice, but they are too thick for me. Although the Moleskine could also be one or two centimeters smaller. They can also be used well with a ballpoint pen ...

Hypocritical Phonies

State Secretary sees potential for improvements in software patent directive - while her boss lobbies for the Council's proposal in the European Parliament. Of course, they are so well informed by software patent opponents - as we could see how the government implemented the Bundestag's request ...

Webspammer with new tricks?

It seems like web spammers are learning a few new tricks. In any case, I stumbled upon links to myself that come from a WordPress blog consisting only of wild HTML snippets that seem to have been created due to searches for "house" - and then in the blogroll of the blog are various typical junk sites. So it could be that spammers are now building pseudo-sites with links and content that are supposed to flood the search indexes of systems like Technorati or the ping services.

Oh, and the Texas-Holdem guys have also learned a few new tricks - the URLs now have more changing server names and file names so that normal keyword filters no longer work quite as well and I am more often presented with spam for moderation - for a long time the stuff went directly into the trash because the guys were really too stupid ...

Annoying bunch.

NeoOffice/J 1.1 Final is out

NeoOffice/J is indeed a software monster - but so are all other office packages (at least those with a correspondingly large range of functions). And unlike the others, NeoOffice/J is not only free beer but also free speech. So go and download, so that Microsoft gets another kick in the ass.

Nostalgia-Surfing

Softlanding Linux System was the first Linux distribution I used. I had it copied onto 5 1/4" floppies from an acquaintance through the university. Slackware - which emerged from it - I naturally only smiled at and ignored as a high-tech user, as it still used the outdated a.out executable format. I switched quite early to Debian (still a 0.9 version) - but I have been consistently loyal to it only since version 1.2.

On my desktop computers, all kinds of systems - and unfortunately far too many PC systems among them, as I didn't have my Mac from the beginning. So I struggled with OS/2, various Windows versions, and again and again DOS with all kinds of multitasking add-ons (Desqview was cool).

Exotics also got a chance: with the Mac, I also tried BeOS for quite a while - but the software offering was too boring for me. And on the PC, the weirdest thing was a stripped-down Windows 3.1 of mine that served as a bootloader for ObjectWorks (which merged into Visual Works) and then managed my system in Smalltalk - but it wasn't a solution either due to the system break.

Linux on the desktop? I'd rather not. At the company for a while, at home also from time to time (also on a Mac), but somehow it never really clicked. Too spoiled by the Mac, I think. Although it's strange - because especially for Linux there are the most programming language implementations, and programming in exotic languages has remained my favorite game genre to this day ...

Servers? Since Debian, only Linux. 9 years now. Although in times of Apache+stuff, it has almost become irrelevant what runs underneath. It's also strange how we have achieved the holy grail of programming - fully portable software that doesn't care about operating systems. Completely without Java, by the way. The new desktop is the web browser anyway.

In my professional career, there are also things like MVS system programming in Assembler and longer years of Cobol slavery. But I'll spare us the links ...

Apple sued over iTunes interface

Patent madness this time against Apple:

These areas include iTunes' menu selection process, the ability of the software to transfer music tracks to a portable music player, and search capabilities such as sorting music tracks by genre, artist and album.

Translated: the guy claims to have patents on how to select menus in iTunes, copying music files to a portable player, and sorting music tracks by genre, artist, and album. Great. Very high level of creativity.

Of course, patent supporters will now have plenty of reasons why this would not be possible in Europe. And they will refer such nonsense as the one above to the realm of fantasy until the cases are actually tried in European courts.

It's amusing when a company that likes to wield the lawsuit club against copied interfaces finds itself on the receiving end of such a lawsuit club. But the matter itself is concerning - what is being done with patents today has nothing to do with the original intention - protecting the inventor from exploitation by powerful companies.

The Horror of Sony DRM

Who wants to know what Sony's digital rights management really means for a Windows user: Michael Amor Righi describes the joys he had with a CD and the DRM software, especially the removal of the latter ...

Found at zenzizenzizenzic

The State Sees Everything

A note on the culture blog about a FAZ article on the tax identification number and the central register of the entire federal population based on it. Yes, everyone gets the tax identification number - even newborns. Comment from the culture blog:

The Federal Republic of Germany as a state is well on its way to generally suspecting and criminalizing every citizen, and those who carry out these measures are making themselves complicit in this development. 1984, Brave New World, and Globalia are calling.

Found via Zenzizenzizenzic

Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress

Who wants to participate in Google's latest toy, there is a WordPress plugin for it. I myself have not yet quite decided who actually benefits more from the sitemaps - the site admins or Google. I guess it's - similar to rel="nofollow" - rather in Google's favor.

del.icio.us mal Wiki = Code Snippets

Code Snippets is a system where you can insert small code snippets and assign tags to them. So really something like a wiki for source code with tags. You can quickly group by tag combinations and then see all the snippets for this topic. And of course, you can easily add your own snippets. Could be very interesting with a bit more content - so to speak, living cookbook books.

The Basic Rights Report 2005

shows how we are maneuvered around the Basic Law via back channels to gradually undermine our fundamental rights. Technical feasibility and data greed lead to an ever-increasing undermining of the framework set by the Basic Law. The Federal Constitutional Court thereby becomes a purely theoretical finger-pointer - because as we now know, even a ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court is not reason enough for the state apparatus to curb its desires.

MEP overturns software patents

After all, the EU deputies are swinging into line with the EU Council. That's what people like the concentrated incompetence of the German government - some call her the Federal Minister of Justice - imagine democracy to be. There was a clear vote of the European Parliament. There was a unanimous resolution of the Bundestag factions. There were clear protests and clear warnings from experts. And who will win in the end? The lobbyists.

If that's what democracy is supposed to be, then I'm Heinzelmann. And then the prolethicians in Berlin are surprised when the citizens reject the EU constitution - which would have given such mummery a constitutional cloak.

On the altar of monopolization, these idiots sacrifice the medium-sized software industry and open source. Just to crawl up to some slimy lobbyists - for which the companies they represent then diligently cut jobs, sell off parts of the company to non-European investors, and move production abroad.

Great strategy.

Should Fin and Humpback Whales Be Hunted Again?

Japan will now also hunt minke and humpback whales

Japanese whalers will now be allowed to hunt almost 900 minke whales annually in the IWC protected area of the Antarctic. After a two-year transition period, the catch quota for fin and humpback whales will be increased to 50 animals each. Both species are highly endangered. Japan justifies the increase in quotas with an alleged recovery of whale stocks.

How perverse does a society have to be when it subordinates nature to economic interests to such an extent that even endangered species are not spared. Our nature is irreplaceable - everything we destroy is gone. Never comes back. But who cares - if some idiots want to buy something, others want to make money from it. And they come up with the most absurd lies to justify it.

Even if there were a recovery of animal populations: the populations are so decimated that any recovery is urgently needed for the survival of the animals. Large whales have large territories and few calves - if the population becomes too low, the whales no longer find each other often enough for reproduction. Similar problems already exist today with blue whales.

Staats-GmbH for tax software is dissolved - just plain embarrassing the whole thing. And the money that was burned there ...

Tuition Fees in NRW

Since summer 2006:

It was a rather uncontroversial meeting two weeks ago: In just three hours, the major topic of "education" was dealt with. Result of the harmonious coalition round of CDU and FDP: The "fastest possible" introduction of tuition fees, possibly as early as summer 2006.

Ripping off can be done very quickly, and freeing up studies from the bothersome working-class children for the sons and daughters of citizens again goes even faster for bourgeois parties. Although it is an absolute audacity in NRW with its extremely high proportion of workers, but what does that matter to Zerrüttgers and his ilk. They will ruin the country faster than the SPD ever could have ...

Oooops!!

Uuuuups!!

It wasn't me. Honestly.

Crafts want to offset sick days with vacation

According to at least association president Otto Kentzler. And the shocking part: apparently, something this idiotic already exists:

According to the report, such a regulation already exists: in the Bavarian collective wage agreement for confectioners, it is already stipulated that for every five sick days, one vacation day will be deducted. However, the maximum "vacation loss" is limited to three days per year.

But what the illness (for which one is declared unfit for work by the doctor) has to do with recovery time (as vacation is defined) and how such a thing can go together is of course not explained.

Oh, and the fact that the rate of sickness is already at a record low does not interest this puppet from the trade association at all - why let oneself be impressed by facts and reality when one can instead unload one's populist nonsense ...

Cash Registers: Dispute Over the Use of the Special Contribution

During the health care reform, the employee is being robbed again:

The revenues from the additional contribution rate flow to the health insurance funds. There is no link to individual services.

This is an absolute audacity. First, they lie that the contribution rates are being lowered through the health care reform. Then, employees are asked to pay separately to secure benefits that are no longer secured. And the Minister of Health still claims that her idiotic reform is the best thing since sliced bread.

Above all, the reason why the link to the benefits for the special payments was removed from the law text in the first place is an audacity:

In the law text from autumn 2004, the two benefits were not mentioned for constitutional reasons. Background: Retirees, for example, could have sued for a special contribution for sick pay before the Constitutional Court because they cannot receive sick pay at all.

Ultimately, this turns a rather dubious maneuver to avoid lawsuits into a direct reach into the pockets of employees - because the benefits will probably be cut in the long run anyway, or they will reach in again. Of course, the whole thing could have been implemented in a legally compliant and correct manner. Or one could have come up with the idea that the equal burden on employees and employers makes sense. But the competence in the Ministry of Health probably does not suffice for that ...

In this way, employees whose salaries are high enough are literally driven out of the statutory health insurance - because nobody likes to be taken for a ride like that. And if all the high earners opt out, the health system will be even more strained and there will be even less money available.

The proletarians in Berlin couldn't care less. They are all privately insured ...

Software description from metaowl.de

Who cares what plugins I used to put together the Metaeule? Here is a first description. Basically, all parts are normally available, I just had to write a few small plugins and a bit of glue code and a few small patches myself. Already a pretty good sign for WordPress and the available plugins when you can get so far without having to do too much work yourself.

Of all places, NRW ...

WASG: Lafontaine wants to be number one in NRW - oh Menno, does the stun grenade have to be placed in NRW? I wouldn't have anything against the WASG, but sorry, Lafontaine is simply unacceptable. Too many have forgotten his actions against the unions in the 80s, too many his hollow populism. He doesn't offer solutions for NRW or the federal government - only empty slogans.

Just a question for the Mac experts

I have a strange problem: for some time now, all applications appear two or three times in the "Open with" menu. Is there any way to stop the computer from doing this nonsense? I suspect this is due to the backups - there are the same applications again on external drives, but somehow they should disappear, on my normal drive there is definitely only one Photoshop ...

About the Security of Credit Cards ...

... there's no need to discuss this any further. After all, 40 million credit card details were stolen - and this was from a brokerage company's computer that acts as an intermediary between retailers and credit card companies. Quite an achievement - just like that, 40 million people are potentially exposed to incorrect debits. Calling something like this a security vulnerability is quite an audacity ...

Changes in the Metaeule

Well, the Metaeule is good for more than just aggregating RSS feeds - that would be boring, anyone can do that. Okay, the links are very interesting, but still - just putting together a Planet-like aggregator would be boring.

Therefore, I have now redesigned the search and archive views a bit. From now on, new posts on the homepage will only be posted as excerpts. In the archive and search results, the posts will only appear as titles in the results list - the search is sorted by relevance (as well as MySQL can manage). The special feature: each article or title has a link in the archive. With this link, you can access the secured article page. So even if the original host is not available, the content of the post is retrievable (though only the content that was also provided to me via the RSS feed - if the blog only has excerpts in the RSS feed, only excerpts will end up in the database). Additionally, at the bottom of the archive page, there is a list of posts on the posts themselves that might be relevant to this post - of course only within the limits of what MySQL can manage.

Overall, the Metaeule is no longer just a simple aggregator, but also an archive, a topic-specific search engine, and a cross-reference list. Let's see how useful it turns out to be in real use. Once everything is running smoothly, I will write about which plugins and changes I used for this. Promised.

wp-cache-2 and PHP Accelerator

If you want to use the very useful caching plugin wp-cache-2, you need to be careful: it is not compatible with the PHPAccelerator. Unfortunately, you cannot use both together, only one of the two works. Quite annoying, because they address different elements - the plugin caches the output, the accelerator caches the precompiled PHP. Therefore, the accelerator would also help the cache system, since the cache system is written in PHP ...

Anyway, I have activated the plugin on the WordPress blogs I manage. Especially the Metaeule could benefit from this in the long run. The caching is currently set to 20 minutes, so that changes in the database do not hang around for too long before everyone can see them. Let's see what oddities occur during operation.

One thing I expected not to work properly anymore is the Plugin Popularity Contest - this counts how often a post has been called up. This happens much less frequently due to the caching and therefore the numbers are no longer meaningful. Ratings based on comments and trackbacks are of course still possible, but the page views are useless. A pity actually, but in return I get much lower server load and much higher delivery rates: with activated wp-cache I have a load of just under 4 with 20 competing massive accesses and shovel just under 50 requests per second. Without wp-cache I have a load of over 9 and only just manage 5 requests per second.

So with wp-cache-2 only half the load and ten times the performance. For that I gladly sacrifice the Popularity Contest.

A second plugin that I noticed: Search Hilight (standard plugin from WordPress) doesn't work. Logically - it colors search terms that are determined from the referrer of a search engine. And referrers do not go into the cache signature. A pity, it was a visually nice gimmick. But on the other hand not really that important.

Ego-Surfing

Ego-Surfing

Wow. Out of 11 million Hugos, I'm in second place ...

Forum operators will soon no longer be able to take vacations

For operators are liable for the delayed removal of illegal content:

The forum operator's statement that he had no opportunity to block access within the 24-hour period due to absence was not accepted by the judge. In the age of "fast emails," the defendant is obliged to comply with the deadline set by the plaintiff. Therefore, he has to bear the court costs and the out-of-court costs of the plaintiff.

This makes the private operation of a forum de facto impossible - at least if you set it up alone. And since blogs with their comment function are essentially forums, we can look forward to the first lawsuit against a blogger. What a mess. Of course, illegal content must be removed immediately - but equating "immediately" with a deadline of one day is sheer nonsense.

And what a practical method to get rid of an unpleasant colleague: if he announces that he will be offline for a few days, quickly post something in the forum and file a complaint ...

Schily is still struggling with democracy

Schily accuses data protection officer of abuse of office - sure, we've already had that, nothing new. But somehow it becomes even creepier through constant repetition. I mean, from any halfway intelligent person I would expect to learn from stupid mistakes and think next time before leaning out of the window. But Otto Orwell is pain- and oblivious ...

So-called experts ...

... then bring such absurd suggestions in the value-added tax discussion:

Such a step was recommended by the head of the Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI), Thomas Straubhaar. According to his ideas, the value-added tax should be raised to 20 percent. The reduced tax rate of seven percent - which currently applies to food, among other things - should be completely abolished.

Clear, super idea. 20% value-added tax and abolishing the reduced rates (which would immediately be an increase in the value-added tax on staple foods and books by 13 points!) - these are the ideal suggestions to stimulate the ailing domestic consumption.

It is completely absurd - everyone seems to only have the goal of taking even more from those who have little. Or has anyone ever heard in the context of such proposals that in the course of a value-added tax increase - especially one as drastic as 13 points - unemployment benefits, minimum wages (where they exist in some industries), the amount of salaries still tax-free for employees, social assistance rates, and pensions must be increased by at least the same rate so that they can still afford a normal life?

Reducing payroll taxes is nice - but this only affects companies and employees (only if the payroll taxes for employers are not to be reduced again). Those who do not have payroll taxes (because they are not employees, or fall below the minimum rate) do not benefit from the reduction in payroll taxes. Quite apart from the fact that even with small salaries, the total payroll taxes are lower than an increase in the value-added tax on food by 13 points.

According to the opinion of such great economic experts, pensioners, the unemployed, social assistance recipients, and low-wage earners are probably just supposed to die socially acceptable ...

Your inhuman attitude disgusts me, you pseudo-experts.

US immigration officers are soon to be peepers

Because the US government plans to use backscatter X-ray scanners on airline passengers - and with a method of X-ray technology that completely scans through clothing and basically leaves the person standing naked on the monitor. Great idea. Especially great is the reaction of the representative of this brain fart:

Chertoff had made it clear to the legislators, according to a report in the New York Times, that he did "not want endless debates" about data protection issues.

That could easily be from Otto Orwell, that saying ...

Well, just another reason not to want to travel to the USA. They really have a screw loose.

Expanding Surveillance is the Goal

Federal Data Protection Commissioner criticizes eavesdropping compromise

"This contradicts the spirit of the judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court of March 3, 2004, which, emphasizing an absolutely protected core area of private life, declared significant parts of the previous provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure on the major eavesdropping to be unconstitutional," emphasized Schaar.

Well, the government, which is not even interested in the cross-party vote of the Bundestag against software patents, will probably not be interested in a judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court either - if it runs counter to their interests. And the Union - should the change take place - is not even satisfied with the measures and wants even more surveillance, even fewer rights for citizens, and even more data collection. While no criminals will be caught, political activism certainly advances one's career in politics - no matter how nonsensical the activism is.

The fatal aspect: our rights are not just being eroded - things that were hard and painstakingly achieved are being dismantled. These are damages that will probably not be repaired quickly - because once the data is available and the access possibilities are there, the state and the investigative apparatus will not want to back down. All this in the name of a pretended and alleged security for which there is no evidence.

Call Mail.App Filter with Keyboard Codes

Mail Act-On 1.3 is a Mail.App plugin that allows you to assign mail filters to keys. Additionally, there is a Quicksilver-like selection interface when you press a general hotkey.

The tool has a bug when used with a non-English version of Mail.app: when it tries to set the stop rule, it hangs. You can either create the stop rule manually (simply create a rule that starts with the same prefix as all other Act-On rules and set the action to stop rule processing) or disable the check for the stop rule in the settings - in the latter case, you should make sure that you have deactivated all Act-on rules, because otherwise they will also run on incoming emails if Act-On is not loaded for some reason - and they will cause all kinds of mischief with the emails.

Metaowl is life!

So, now the Metablog on data protection, informational self-determination, RFID and related topics is online:

http://metaowl.de/

If you want to participate, there is a participation description in the Metablog. Just check which way is best for you and sign up. Somehow we will integrate every content provider. A list of participating blogs and sources used is also online.

Of course, it works best and easiest if you can provide an RSS feed for your category - then I can directly take over the entries. But Technorati tags, blogg.de tags, del.icio.us tags (if you just want to provide pointers to interesting sites) or trackbacks also work. We just need something from which we can somehow extract an RSS feed (Atom is also fine), then it will work. If necessary, a script will be written that generates an RSS feed.

And one more request: feel free to link to the Metablog. It could use a bit of Google juice, we don't want only the cheerleading articles to be found when searching for data protection-related topics, do we?

And for those who just want to inform themselves about the topic: the Metablog has an RSS feed through which you will receive all the collected news. Or browse the archives - the search searches the full texts of the postings (of course only if the blog's RSS feed has provided them) - http://metaowl.de/ can therefore also be used as an interesting archive in the long run.

Popularity Contest

Alex King has a nice plugin for WordPress: the Popularity Contest. This collects and calculates various values for posts and determines which are the most popular. I've integrated it into my sidebar (below the images). In addition to the tags for embedding in the template, it also provides a wealth of information on a subpage of the WordPress admin homepage. There you can view popularity by category or type of metric. Let's see how the values develop.

Probably a seat in the government will soon be available

The Federal Government's Commissioner for Human Rights criticizes Russia and China in his human rights report - and yet the Chancellor of Industry has just kissed Wladimir and wants to do business with China ...

Zabel not to Tour

Zabel must make way for Ullrich - say Kummer and Ludwig. If you ask me: stupid idea. Zabel would also be good as a lone fighter for some show. Well, let's hope for Vinokourov.

Also sometimes a good judgment to announce

Acquittal in the Hyperlink Case:

The judges and lay judges of the 38th Criminal Chamber of the Regional Court acknowledged without reservation that Freude's reporting on Nazi websites criticized by the Düsseldorf District Government had been a documentation of contemporary history.

Very good!

Lunchtime with Macro

Lunch Break with Macro

Today I spent my lunch break with my camera and macro lens at the Botanical Garden. There are a few more photos to see at hugoesk.de. And the glorious rest on viele-bunte-bilder.de (no longer online). (And yes, my lunch breaks happen at strange times and in strange forms - at least when I work from home)

Lunchtime with Macro

Lunch Break with Macro